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GOG working on future partnerships, The Witcher coming May 10, Alone in the Dark series out now

Digital distributor GOG has revealed its plans for the future, covering a new client, messaging, The Witcher and big-name publishers.

Big plans are afoot at Good Old Games, the digital distributor revealed during owner CD Projekt's CDP Days 2011 Spring Conference today. These include a new downloader, messaging, new releases and the landing of big-name publishers.

GOG cruelly teased that it has signed a deal with either Electronic Arts, Square Enix, Take Two, LucasArts or Microsoft Game Studios, declining to specify which. Over 25 games from the mystery publisher will start arriving on GOG in early summer.

The company is also in talks with another two of those publishers, whose catalogues are those most requested by GOG users. Again, it didn't mention which two. GOG hopes to settle these deals by the end of summer and begin launching games this fall.

Hopefully, GOG will soon actually specify which of the five publishers it's dealing with. Unfortunately, fans of at least two publishers have now had their hopes raised and will soon find them dashed. It'll be like the fake shutdown fallout all over again.

A new Good Old Games downloader client is also on the way, complete with error checking and multithreaded downloads to fully utilise your connection. Each 10MB chunk of a download will be checked to ensure it's intact, then only re-downloading bad chunks rather than the whole file. The new client will also bring messaging, though GOG stressed that it's still lean and not a bloated beast.

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The new GOG client is due to launch later this month.

Back on future releases, GOG announced that The Witcher, developed by its sibling studio CD Projekt RED, is coming to the store on May 10. It'll initially be priced at $4.99 to celebrate the launch of The Witcher 2, before rising to the regular price of $9.99 on May 24.

GOG will offer the Enhanced Director's Cut Edition of The Witcher plus extra goodies, giving you a 2011 calendar featuring erotic artwork from the RPG's 'sex cards,' a PDF version of the art book from the Collector's Edition, the soundtrack, a short story, and more.

For impatient gits who demand new old games right now, today also saw the GOG release of Alone in the Dark, Alone in the Dark 2 and Alone in the Dark 3. The three vintage Infogrames survival horrors come together in a handy $5.99 bundle. Downloadable soundtracks and other goodies are also thrown in. More Atari games are also on the way.